Conceptual Modeling for the Design of Fuzzy Object Oriented Databases

In recent years, a primary objective of the database community has been the incorporation of structured and complex data types. This has led to new database models based on the established relational paradigm as well as the object-oriented paradigm. An important research trend in databases is to handle different types of uncertainty at both conceptual and logical levels. The trend of incorporating complex objects in databases presents opportunities for representing imprecision and uncertainty that were difficult to integrate cohesively in simple database models. In this study we first introduce a conceptual data model by extending ExIFO to handle both complex and uncertain, mainly fuzzy, objects and classes. As our logical data model we utilize the similarity-based object-oriented database model to deal with fuzzy objects at the logical level. Then a mapping algorithm is presented to transform the conceptual schema modeled by object-oriented ExIFO into the fuzzy OO database model for ultimate information.